There’s a story familiar to many Angelenos about the nefarious corporate conspiracy that killed the Red Car, Los Angeles’ glorious but short-lived early twentieth century public transportation system. It’s a dramatic fable, which also happens to be profoundly untrue. The tale begins in 1901, when railroad magnate Henry Huntington broke ground on what would soon become the largest electric trolley system in the world, connecting myriad villages and housing developments (many built by Huntington’s real estate interests) throughout the Los Angeles basin, cohering them into a single urban megalopolis. It was an… Read More »

Courtroom X, on the 17th floor of a nondescript office building in downtown Los Angeles, is a cramped and bland-looking space about the size of a classroom. It seems like an appropriate place to adjudicate traffic citations. Instead, it’s a place where veritable death sentences are handed down to children. Just two months ago, before the Ferguson protests, the Islamic State beheadings of two American journalists, and the celebrity-nude-picture hack, the Central American child refugee crisis briefly dominated the headlines and sent Congress into conniptions. Republican lawmakers, with support from the Obama… Read More »

Anand Gopal’s job is to report from the front lines of conflict. He spent years as the Wall Street Journal’s reporter in Afghanistan, and in a few months he will be heading to Iraq to take stock of the chaos enveloping the region. In the wake of the Islamic State’s murder of photojournalist James Foley, VICE checked in with Gopal to find out what he thinks of the situation unfolding in Iraq and the risks inherent in reporting from a war zone. VICE: You spent years living in and reporting from Afghanistan, first… Read More »

In recent weeks, incidents of lethal police violence against unarmed young black men have occurred in cities across the country, not just Ferguson. But in Ferguson more than anywhere, police doubled down on their role as a hostile occupying force in the community, showing off theirmassive collection of military-grade equipment and weaponry in a crude (and so far unsuccessful) attempt to intimidate the local population it purports to serve. This isn’t the first time a local police force has turned an American city into something resembling a war zone in the name of civilian crowd control…. Read More »

Matthew Hoh is a former Marine who served two tours in Iraq before being stationed in Afghanistan as a high-ranking foreign service officer. In 2009, Hoh resigned in protest from the State Department over the U.S.’ misguided occupation of Afghanistan. Leighton Woodhouse, who interviewed Hoh, writes for Capital & Main. Note: This interview was conducted before the Obama administration announced that it would not send in ground troops to evacuate refugees on Mount Sinjar. You’ve written that sending U.S. troops back into Iraq, bombing the Islamic State, or otherwise engaging militarily in Iraq’s civil war… Read More »

On Monday, the Center for Constitutional Rights filed a request to the U.S. Supreme Court for judicial review of Blum v. Holder, a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act.The request, and the history that led up to it, provides a glimpse into the ways in which the free speech rights of political activists continue to be eroded as a result of the defining legal and constitutional framework of our era, the “War on Terror.” The brainchild of the American Legislative Exchange Council, the AETA was crafted as a direct response to the extraordinary… Read More »

The clock is ticking for six refugee children from El Salvador and Guatemala who are plaintiffs in a class action lawsuit that seeks to compel the Obama administration to ensure access to legal representation for tens of thousands of unaccompanied minors facing deportation proceedings. The plaintiffs are among the more than 50,000 Central American children who have illegally crossed the border into the Southwestern United States in recent months, fleeing threats of violence by transnational street gangs that arguably exert more effective control over the daily lives of residents in large swathes of El Salvador, Guatemala… Read More »

Isabel Mejia was 17 years old when she arrived in the United States from El Salvador, having fled her home country for reasons even the most hardened immigration opponent might have trouble dismissing. Some local gang members had decided to conscript her as the “gang’s girlfriend” — to force her into a life of sexual slavery. At home, the situation was no better: She had been a victim of domestic sexual violence. Faced with rape, death or flight, she chose to flee. Today, Isabel (not her real name), now 18, lives in… Read More »

Anyone who has ever seen a film or documentary depicting the violent atrocities that routinely occurred during the Civil Rights movement in America knows the scene well: a young black boy looks at a white woman in a way that makes her uncomfortable. A black woman walks home alone past a group of white boys. A civil rights leader angers the wrong group of businessmen in town, and violence erupts in the form of lynchings, rapes, burning crosses, murder … Inspired by Gandhi’s success with non-violence and passive resistance in… Read More »

This post originally appeared in Capital & Main: Every year for Black History Month, the TV networks and premium movie channels roll out the same programming: Malcolm X, Mississippi Burning, The Color Purple…. It’s not that these films aren’t great; they are. It’s just that every year for as long as they have been around, they’re all that come on during February. I can quote The Color Purple line for line. The history of black folks is larger and more diverse than the Civil Rights Movement and slavery. Let’s give… Read More »